Take better notes, and the world will beat a path to your door. Or something like that. =) As it turns out, sketchnotes are an excellent way to capture ideas from presentations and meetups. Eric asked me if I was interested in sketchnoting more of the Awesome Foundation Toronto pitch nights. (They give the awesomest project $1000 in a paper bag to help make things happen.) I did the sketchnotes for a while because I wanted to learn more about what makes projects awesome. The sketchnotes were faster to make and more engaging than video highlights, so people really liked them. But I’ve been inching away from sketching other people’s stuff so that I can focus on my own, so…

Awesome Foundation is pretty cool and I like how they encourage people to come up with and share great ideas… but I’m keeping my event commitments to the minimum. Maybe it will be a good fit for someone else, though – local sketchnoters building their portfolio and their business, perhaps? It would be great to see different styles, too!

Anyway, since I’m moving a little bit away from doing events, I thought I’d put together some guides to help people who are looking for event sketches.

I’ve written about how I use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on my Windows-based Lenovo X220 tablet PC (which is a Proper Computer and everything, so I can run all sorts of other stuff in addition to drawing on my screen). To make things even easier, I’ve put together the light dot grid that I use for drawing consistently even when I’m zoomed in, a PSD that has the grid, and the brushes that I use to draw different widths easily.

3. Use the radial menu to import the brushes. You can create a new brush set if you want, and then import the brushes into that.

Import brush set

4. Drag and drop the brushes into your brush palette (the long vertical one) in the order you want.

Brush set

I use the first three pens for small, medium, and large widths. The largest pen is useful for colouring. I keep it there so that I can change the size easily without messing up the other three pens. I usually use the highlighter on a separate layer so that I can change my mind about highlighters afterwards, but if you need to highlight as you go, you can use the second highlighter (based on the Copic brushes) to highlight on the same layer.

Meloney Hall interviewed me about sketchnoting. I managed to listen, talk, and sketch while doing this. Boggle! Although talking interferes a little with writing words, so my notes become more graphical. Hmm, maybe that’s a way for me to experiment with more graphical notes… =)